The Special Collections Division of The University of Manchester Library holds a collection of nearly 15,000 fragments from the Genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo. They were purchased from the estate of Dr Moses Gaster in 1954. They are mostly written in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and Arabic but there are also a few Judeo-Spanish, French, and Coptic items and a Yiddish (B 6619) and an Ottoman Turkish piece (Ar. 400). About 90% of the items are on paper, the remainder on parchment. Most of them are manuscripts but there are printed texts too.

Most of the fragments in the Rylands Genizah collection are small and relatively late. However, it also contains important early fragments, such as various autographs of Maimonides. They date from the 10th to the 19th century AD. The earliest dated piece is a biblical fragment with the beginning of the Book of Jeremiah and a colophon, dated 954 CE (Rylands Genizah 2). The latest dated fragment is a divorce letter (geṭ) from Bombay, 1879 (A 960). The fragments cover a wide range of topics including religious and literary texts, documentary sources, letters, and material relating to grammar, philosophy, medicine, astrology, and astronomy.

The Gaster Genizah Collection is divided into more than a dozen series, that have been digitised or catalogued to various degrees. The reason for this division is not entirely clear. Most fragments are in series A and B, almost all paper. Series P contains mostly parchment fragments; series L large fragments, and series C calculatory fragments. For a detailed overview of the collection and its division into series, see Renate Smithuis, “Short Introduction to the Genizah Collection in the John Rylands Library,” in From Cairo to Manchester: Studies in the Rylands Genizah Fragments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1-32.

This online Genizah Collection contains high resolution images of the great majority of these fragments.